I finally took the plunge and upgraded my great weapon fighter’s companion from blue to purple quality last night. I really like the dread warrior companion, it’s been a great help as I’ve levelled and he has a chance of healing me and increasing my threat generation so he’s a pretty good tanking companion. However at blue quality I was noticing in the new campaign zones that he was getting flattened pretty quickly by larger enemy attacks.

The upgrade from blue to purple costs an eye-watering 750,000 astral diamonds. That’s a lot of dailies for the bonus AD or via the Zen exchange 1500 Zen’s worth of astral diamonds at the current capped exchange rate of 500 to 1. It’s a seller’s market completely at present as soon as I listed the Zen it was instantly snapped up even at that price. I could possibly have scrapped together enough AD to buy the upgrade by robbing all of my characters of their AD but with multiple campaigns active on all my characters there are other uses for their AD such as unlocking the higher campaign tasks or buying much-needed tier gear.

Me and my dread warrior

I’d contemplated buying another purple companion outright as that would probably be better ‘value’ than upgrading but for this particular character the dread warrior is a perfect fit and I’m very used to playing with him. If I’m going to spend real money on the game I’d rather it was for something I’ll see plenty of use out of – we’re currently doing the dailies for both Sharandar and the Dragon campaign as a duo so having combat companions is still very useful.

4 Responses to Neverwinter: companion upgrade time

I’ve considered upgrading my Ioun Stone of Allure, but I’m incredibly stingy with my AD. (I still have my pre-order AD so I’m sitting on over 3 million but still… that’s a big expense!) I’ve never really come up with a decent plan to earn AD. Over in STO, I can earn Dilithium (and every other resource) very easily but I don’t have A Plan yet in NW.

Are you in Icewind Dale yet? I worked my butt off a couple weeks ago to get my Gear Score over 10k (I didn’t know then that enchantments are the big trick to cranking up your GS) but holy crap I get owned like nobody’s business in IWD. I can solo Dread Ring quests but I need a group for every single quest in IWD. And of course no one groups for anything other than the instances and some of the heroic quests. Very sad as a cleric when I go there.

I’ve not really got much of a plan yet re: AD though in several cases I’ve finally maxed my chosen profession on a character so Leadership is now a priority to get maxed.

I have two characters in IWD but since I’ve not done many epic dungeon runs on any character, and only done the bare minimum of Sharandar or Dread Ring to unlock IWD both characters gear is pretty poor (just over 10k). That makes the IWD campaign a painful solo experience with some of the tougher content like the lairs borderline impossible on a squishier character. Duo it’s a lot better but still I prefer the Tyranny campaign over IWD as I’m not a gear-progression / raiding fan and IWD felt like too much of a “one misstep and your dead” level of content.

The AD – Zen exchange seems to be a bit broken actually, since there is so much more demand for Zen than there is supply, but the exchange rate is capped at 500. From what I’ve seen on Reddit the more savvy players exchange their Zen by buying certain items from the Zen market and then selling them on the AH, which is the only way to receive something close to the “true” exchange rate, considering the demand.